I don’t know what Brooks’ lawyer thought. Nor have I seen
any PR heads giving their view.

For what it’s worth, I think Brooks’ act could only be
considered ‘tactically’ sound, if staying on top of the 24-7 media agenda was important to some other aim within the context of the impending criminal trial. By pre-empting the
CPS and announcing that she had been charged she won a couple of decent
headlines and signalled an important message to her supporters in the media and
elsewhere.The problem is, this isn’t the end of it and it’s difficult
to see how she will be able to keep ahead of the discourse for long. Surely her
lawyers will be trying to get her to keep schtum. Or will they?

An organisation has several options when releasing
information about a crisis. Perhaps the most common, intuitive position is to say nothing, or deny everything. In the early
days of the phone hacking scandal that’s what News International seemed to do. They
stuck to the ‘one rogue reporter’ line until a mounting set of allegations, culminating in the details surrounding the court case concerning Milly Dowler, left them with no credibility left. At some point during the summer of 2011 News International
must have realised that it needed to start fessing up about a few things. That’s
when rumours started about ‘draining the swamp’ in and around Wapping. It was
met with a backlash by senior News International journalists.

I understand that the tactic of ‘stealing thunder’
originates in the arena of courtroom rhetoric (happy to be told I'm wrong on this). Lawyers in jury trials have,
apparently for a long time, adopted the tactic, particularly when defending
dubious clients. So much the better to tell the jury early doors that there’s a stain
on your client’s character, rather than leave it to the prosecution, juries don’t like
that.

Outisde the courtroom, if you’ve got bad news, the tactic
implies it’s better to adopt a journalistic mindset, and look to scoop the
hacks. In PR parlance this is known politely as ‘initiating a crisis
communication scenario.’ And there’s actually some evidence the tactic works by
enhancing the credibility of the person/organisation who fesses up. A study byArpan and Roskos-Ewoldsen concluded that organisations that ‘steal thunder’ are
perceived as more credible than those that do not.

According to PR theory the more credible an organisation is
perceived to be, the more palatable its messages become, the more palatable its
messages the higher the likelihood that customers will continue to buy its
product.

By way of illustration (not I stress correlation or
causation) latest circulation figures show that 2.4 million people per week buy
the Sun on Sunday, just 200,000 less than bought the News of the World before
it was closed last year.